


Rooted

by Lemur710



Category: The Magnificent Seven (2016)
Genre: Gen, M/M, Missing Scene
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-16
Updated: 2018-08-16
Packaged: 2019-06-28 09:06:55
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,281
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15704124
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lemur710/pseuds/Lemur710
Summary: ‘Wherever I go, Billy goes.’ Goody only ever said it because it was always true. Until now.We know why Goodnight left, but why did Billy stay?





	Rooted

**Author's Note:**

> _The Magnificent Seven_ got me bad. A diverse cast, rich (but largely untold) backstories, and deep relationships of love and respect between men? Consider me hooked. This is a missing scene that wouldn’t let go. As I am not Korean, I have tried to respectfully illuminate aspects of Billy’s side of the story without veering outside my cultural lane.

She approached slowly at first, her little feet barely making a scrape on the dirt. When she noticed Billy noticing her, though, her back went rod straight and her chin turned high. He looked away again, sliding the whetstone down his blade. He leaned lazily against the barn in the bare bit of shade from the eaves.

She didn’t stop her approach and he didn’t stop noticing it, but with shadows skinny beneath the noon sky, the bees buzzing in search of flowers in the field, and a training ground with no soldiers who wanted training, Billy didn’t see much need for anything but a cool drink and a bit of wind. The blasts from the shooting range were messy and far apart; he suspected Goodnight wasn’t having much more luck than he was. Except that he still had men to train.

“Good day, Mr. Rocks,” the girl said formally when she finally got a few feet from Billy. Her boots twisted on a thick knot of dying grass.

He stopped his sharpening and raised his eyes to her, just beyond the brim of his hat. She swallowed hard and her hands trembled a little, but she didn’t look away. She had dark eyes, nearly as dark as Billy’s, though her skin was more the color of Sam’s. She had curly hair someone had tried and mostly failed to pull back into a tight bun, but the wild halo suited her round cheeks. She looked determined, and very young. Billy would have guessed her to be no more than 14, with the sort of figure that some thought made her a woman but still seemed a little girl to him. Maybe it was having sisters. Or maybe it was just that no amount of woman’s curves, or lack of, had ever made him want to drag one into bed.

“Yes, miss?” Billy answered, just as formally.

She jerked her chin, dropping those deep eyes to the knife in his hands. “You still teaching?”

Billy gestured to the field with only the dummies standing at attention, still slowly seeping their sand insides onto the ground. “Does it look like it?” he asked.

“Well...will ya teach me?”

Billy didn’t respond, except to drag the whetstone with another singing scrape down his knife.

“My mama says girls shouldn’t fight,” the girl went on, her voice steady and sure, “but I’ve seen Miss Emma with her rifle. She’s near as good as all of you and tougher than all the men here and I think I am too.”

“Shooting range is over that way.” Billy tapped his thumb against the silver hilt, wiping away a bit of desert dust.

“No, sir, I can’t. I made a promise to my mama. She said, ‘A girl’s got no business putting her hands on a rifle, revolver, pistol, or pea-shooter.’” She counted them off on her fingers.

Billy looked up at her.

“But she didn’t say anythin’ about knives, Mr. Rocks, sir.”

Billy couldn’t stop the smirk from sliding across his face.  


_____

Turned out the girl’s name was Alice Coppin and she and her family—her mother and two little brothers still in swaddling—had come to Rose Creek in the service of a wealthy family. “Master and Mistress ran before the church’d stopped smoking,” she said. “Mama wanted to stay, so we did.” She was right about being tougher: Seeing how fast Billy could move just made her hungry to start. Seeing him spin the blades in his palm made her want to get her hands on one. More steel in one little girl than the band of farmers who’d scoffed at Billy and turned their backs. So, he taught her as the shadows grew long and the bees found their bounty before buzzing on home.

“Nothing to it,” he said, just above a whisper as he watched her adjust her grip. Billy’s borrowed gloves were loose on her young hands, but they did the job. 

Billy had never been in the military like Goody. He didn’t know drills and exercises to get a person ready for a fight. His own teachers had been fear and necessity, a knife in his hand that he had to learn to use or he’d die, either by starvation or violence. He nudged Alice’s feet—“Wider stance,” he instructed—and he realized that’s all the teachers Alice really had, too. Bogue’s army bearing down on her home, a town full of men not ready to fight, and a country that could be downright hateful to people like her and Sam, and Billy, too.

She threw the knife and it stuck firmly in the wood with a thunk. “Yes!” Alice cried out, throwing her arms in the air. She immediately ran to the dummy to retrieve the knife, then she trotted back to his side for another go, grinning at him with a beaming, youthful smile. Billy felt something kick in his heart.

No, he found himself amending, Alice Coppin’s teachers would be fear, necessity, and Billy Rocks.  


_____

They practiced until the sun started to drop low on the horizon and the shadows switched sides. Billy knew the others would be gathering at the inn soon for supper. A regular meal and plenty of it wasn’t something Billy got often enough to let it pass. “That’s enough for today,” he told Alice. “You’ve got the basics. Keep on doing what you’ve been doing and you’ll get good as me.”

Alice snorted a laugh, tugging Billy’s gloves from her hands to return them. “Will it work as well with my mama’s kitchen knives as it does with those pretty things?”

Her laugh halted, startled into silence when Billy held out the knife to her on his open palm. He offered it to her, as calm and instinctual as any move he’d ever made with a blade. She didn’t take it and he wasn’t surprised. He’d only spent a few hours with her, but he knew Alice Coppin. He knew her character, and they both knew nothing was free, and no one was kind without cause.

Except, Billy knew that sometimes someone was. 

“Take it,” he insisted, and didn’t move his hand until she slowly took the silver handle in her own. When she looked up at him, it was with wet eyes and Billy wondered what this moment might be for Alice in her short life. But he recalled a man he’d met once who had looked upon all of Billy’s brutality and his razor-sharp edges and had seen someone worth loving, so he supposed he could guess, at least a little.

“Keep doing what you’re doing,” he told her again. 

“Yes, sir, Mr. Rocks.” She smiled, a little fragile, like maybe she’d hold those words close, then took a few darting steps off toward home before stopping. She turned back to him. “If you see me in town, don’t...my mama won’t like that I was here, so...”

Billy nodded and waved her concerns away. He knew what it was like to have secrets, too.  


_____

The night before Bogue and his army arrived, Billy stopped cold in the doorway of their shared room at the inn, looking down at the too-thin pillows stacked neatly at the head of the bed, the blanket tucked tight beneath the mattress. It was an old habit from his upbringing Goody never did shake, tidying a room before he left it. Leaving things as good as he found them, if not better, like his daddy always said.

“I can’t do it, Billy,” Goody said by way of explanation, standing from the bed with his coat and boots on when they should be sliding under the wool together. He talked about the owl, that he knew it was real, he knew it was an omen, he could feel it in his core. Billy let him talk. Usually, he liked listening to Goody talk.

Billy didn’t respond, but Goodnight knew his silences. He stopped himself mid-sentence.

“Billy?” he said. It sounded like a plea.

When people couldn’t read him, they thought Billy cold-hearted, and he let them. But Goody had learned his face. They’d learned each other’s, and he saw it when Goody understood what Billy was going to do.

In their years of traveling, they’d met men who’d never walked further from home than the saloon, farmers who only went so far as needed to turn a heifer back toward the barn. And they’d also met men who lived on horseback, the sort of men whose shoes were coated with the dust of a dozen states and only a rainstorm ever cleaned them. There were sorts who chose that life, and then there were sorts like Billy and Goodnight. And like Sam, and Vasquez, Faraday, and Horne, and probably even Red Harvest come to it, Billy thought. There’s a reason they all looked at each other and saw something worth trusting.

If the world were as it should be, Billy supposed he’d have a home. If the world were what it could be, Billy would have a home with Goodnight, someplace settled and peaceful with neighbors and friends who knew their names and learned Billy’s face well enough to see its warmth. He had catches of memory, some echo in his blood that told him it’d been this way for him once, maybe, before everything went wrong.

 _Wherever I go, Billy goes._ Goody only ever said it because it was always true. Until now.

“Billy,” Goody went on, “Death is coming to this town and it will not be kind.”

“Never is.” Billy closed the door behind him but stepped away. He cleared the path between Goody and leaving. 

Goody gaped at him, eyes sad and desperate, at a loss for words in that way only Billy could provoke. “Why here?”

Billy folded his arms across his chest, felt the hilt of his knives just brushing against the tips of his fingers. He shook his head, unsure himself. Maybe he’d stood too long in the field with Alice. Maybe it was Red Harvest’s quiet honor and coming back to defend the land of people who had taken his. Maybe it was Vasquez and Faraday at each other’s throats, then at each other’s backs when the bullets started flying. Maybe it was mad Horne who seemed like the sort of broken monster that came of making a killer out of a father and husband. Maybe it was Sam Chisolm who saw heroes and men in the monsters and killers they’d all become.

Maybe it was even Goodnight Robicheaux who should have been writing poetry and using his sniper’s eye to keep foxes out of the chicken coop, not shuddering in the dark over the souls he’s ripped from the world. 

That’s why they’d always kept moving, he knew. Billy and Goody were the kind who wanted to settle. Life had dragged them from their homes and blasted them to the wind, but he knew they had roots trailing from their boots with every step, just waiting for them to stand still long enough to dig them in, to stick them heart-deep in soil with people who would start to feel like family. They saw injustices like Rose Creek, or even bigger, every day—were on the receiving end of them as often as not—but they always just took their winnings and kept on. Instead of land, they’d rooted to each other, so that something, someone in this scattered, shattered world could still feel like home.

For the first time in so long, Billy’s heart, his honor, his breathing soul and sense of himself, pulled him somewhere other than Goodnight’s side. He could hear the voices of Vasquez, Faraday and Horne drifting up from the porch where they chatted softly, that somber soldier’s contemplation before war. In the creak of chairs rocking on wood and cigar smoke scenting the wind, Billy knew he couldn’t go down and sit with them. But he couldn’t leave them either.

He made sure to kiss Goodnight before he walked out the door. He followed him, but only to the second-floor landing. There, they parted ways. 

For as many years as they’d been together, Billy might have thought the conversation would be longer, but it was short for the same reason they’d lasted so long. You don’t tell someone you love to stop feeling the wounds they got before they met you and you don’t pretend you know what’s best for them. When someone makes you their home, you don’t make yourself a prison.

Billy wanted to be strong enough to turn away first but couldn’t. He stood, hoping, until the door clicked shut behind Goody, then he turned for the stairway down to the liquor his throat and mind felt parched for.

Watching Goody walk away felt just as horrible as being ripped from home always did.  


_____

Alcohol didn’t make Billy’s hands or his resolve any less steady. Tomorrow, he’d stand with Rose Creek and five men he considered friends. More than likely, he’d make roots in this town by ending up six feet under it. For all that Goodnight was the one who dreamt in omens, Billy saw a future, too, and maybe it was that one he drank to blur just a little. Just enough to clear his vision for the battle ahead. Because, even though he wasn’t walking at Goody’s side, he still saw himself dying there. Goody had always been the philosopher, so Billy tried to push it away as wishful thinking, an old hope that couldn’t be killed by drowning.

But he carefully refilled Goody’s flask with his favorite whiskey, just in case.


End file.
